Sagas

{26} The golden stage ~ P

My hands were iron bars around the pink envelope I was holding. I stood there helplessly, watching her shake with tears, out of words to comfort her and unable to give her a simple hug that I was sure would go a long way to ease her aching heart.

Her tears like raindrops fell from her cloudy eyes, hitting and smudging the inky letters on the paper in her hands. It had been this way since yesterday, after Kevin’s arrest. She had held onto Panda, crying and refused to be comforted until she fell asleep last night, and soft snores escaped her lips. And this morning, she surprised me by waking up first, almost her old self again as she wished me a happy independence day, and was a bit chatty until we went downstairs for breakfast, where the main topic was Kevin.

His arrest was on every headline, and so were his pictures, and while I endured listening to other students who had seen the news talk about it, I couldn’t bring myself to check the news. It was Independence Day, but no one seemed to even notice, and if it weren’t for the green and white decorations in every part of the hostel and the rest of the school, and also the announcement for us to be at the senior school auditorium by nine-thirty, it could have as well been any other day.

She had even been slightly alright after breakfast, and didn't go back to crying, but what pushed her mood back to the ground was when she returned with not one but two envelopes from the mailbox. One was the envelope I had put in the mail as Kevin instructed, and the other was a mail that had my name on it. There was no name of the sender, just my full name written on both sides of the envelope in scattered handwriting that made me wonder who could have sent it.

It was while I was still wondering about the envelope in my hands that Peculiar began to cry again. harder than she did yesterday, and no amount of words from me could comfort her. I didn’t know what Kevin had written, and there was no chance of me seeing it as she held it closely to her chest, but I didn’t need to see it to know that Kevin’s words had gotten to her.

It was the oddest thing. Before Kevin’s arrest, she had shown nothing but anger towards him, but now I was getting to realise that maybe she was a bit angry at him for whatever reason, but there were more feelings attached—feelings she didn’t have to talk about as her actions spelled them out. And from what I had witnessed between them yesterday, I had seen that he felt the same way about her.

If I didn’t know Kevin like I did  now, I would have thought it strange for them to be together, but now that I knew he was  not all he portrayed himself to be, I was not so surprised that they liked each other.

It took him being gone for me to understand certain things about him, like why he tried so hard to hide his good side, the part of him that looked out for me even if we were only strangers, the side of him that he couldn’t hide in his art as he showed just how much he empathised with people—the one place he wasn’t afraid of being vulnerable—and I believed that was the real him.

It didn’t matter what anyone else said, not even Drake. Kevin was not completely bad, and if he acted like a jerk, then I believed it was all part of an act. He must have put on this act because it was the only way he could survive in this den that was already driving me insane, even if I had only been here for such a short while. Kevin didn’t belong with them, and he wasn’t like them, therefore, it must have been difficult to remain among them, and at some point, he had to put on tough skin in other to not lose himself.

Kevin wasn’t the only actor in this school. It was a secret I learned not so long ago. I figured out that the entire school was a large golden stage, and every single person within its walls was a performer, an actor deserving of an Oscar award. I had once thought that I was different from the students in here. I thought I was the only one who walked about with weights on my shoulders, but every day that passed by, I realised more and more that I was only one amongst hundreds more, and they probably carried heavier weights.